State Democratic Chair Rick Palacio, left, debates state GOP Chair Ryan Call Monday at the University of Denver. (Allison Sherry, the Denver Post)

Colorado GOP chair Ryan Call and Democratic chair Rick Palacio channeled their respective presidential candidates in a debate Monday at the University of Denver’s law school.

Call said the last three and a half years is reason enough to throw the president out. Colorado’s unemployment rate has jumped more than 2 points, with 13,000 more unemployed than when President Barack Obama took office. Besides not fixing the economy, Call said the federal deficit has grown by more than $5 trillion.

“The current president has never run a company, he hasn’t even so much as run a lemonade stand,” Call said. “This is not the pathway to prosperity the president promised.”

Palacio said it wasn’t fair to ask Obama to so quickly clean up eight years of Republican problems. He said the nation’s deficit when Obama took office was the biggest of any president has inherited and pointed out the reasons behind the deficit — two wars and tax cuts — were policies decided by the previous administration.

“There’s more work to be done. No one is saying we are where we need to be,” he said. “What President Obama knows and what Mitt Romney knows is we need an economy built to last from the middle class out, not the failure of the top down approach in the economy.”

On energy, Call even mimicked, almost word for word, a Romney line from his rally in Jefferson County Sunday night.

Asked what Colorado’s role is in the next energy economy, Call said, “there is great new technology that allows us to drill straight down but sideways … Colorado is a leader nationally in devloping new technologies and I think Colorado has the opportunity to lead the nation.”

(Romney, on Sunday, said, “we have kind of an ace in the hole that came along to us because someone learned how to drill into the earth, not just vertically but horizontally.”)

Palacio praised the U.S. Senate for blocking House-passed legislation that would roll back regulations on coal mining and emissions from coal powered plants.

Perlmutter spokeswoman Leslie Oliver said the clips probably weren’t intended to be made public, but the congressman did knock on the doors of constituents and enjoys widespread support throughout the district.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks at D’Evelyn junior/senior high school in Jefferson County (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post)

Updated with a correction.

As Mitt Romney was giving a speech in Jefferson County on Sunday night to open what will likely be the defining 11 days of his campaign, a new poll came out that is potentially worrisome for the Republican presidential nominee.

It’s not the headline-grabbing 6-point lead for President Barack Obama that the Public Policy Polling survey of likely Colorado voters found. It’s how the survey got to that number.

To come up with their numbers, pollsters have to do more than just make a bunch of phone calls and then crunch the results. They also have to make a guess at what the electorate will look like on Election Day and then structure their likely voter sample to mirror that in order to pull their jumble of results into a coherent picture. It’s where art meets science in polling.

When PPP hit the state earlier this month, it gave Obama a 3-percentage-point lead over Romney, right at the outer edge of that poll’s margin of error. PPP’s sample for that poll predicted an electorate that was 37 percent each Republican and Democrat and 27 percent independent voters. (And, yes, that’s 101 percent, but it’s probably just an illusion of rounding.)

This time around, PPP includes a lot more independents in its sample — dividing its hypothetical electorate 34 percent each for Republicans and Democrats and 31 percent for independents. (Again, rounding.) Put another way, PPP’s sample includes roughly 20 more independent voters this time than last, even though the poll earlier this month had about 60 more voters in the sample (1,001 likely voters earlier this month to 940 likely voters for the most recent poll.)

Why is that significant? Because PPP shows Obama leading Romney by 10 percentage points with independent voters, 51 percent to 41 percent. With more of them in PPP’s soup, it starts tasting more like an Obama lead.

Lynn Bartels thinks politics is like sports but without the big salaries and protective cups. The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog has named her one of Colorado's best political reporters and tweeters.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.